Half of Québec Anglos want out. Why this isn’t news
February 25, 2014 § 8 Comments
So the CBC is reporting that 51% of Anglos and 49% of Allophones in Québec have pondered leaving in the past year (compared to 11% of francophones) But, SURPRISE, it’s not because of language. It’s the economy, stupid. And Québec’s is sinking apparently. Another report I saw today said that Montréal’s economy is lagging behind the Rest of Canada’s major cities. In the past decade, Montréal’s GDP has grown by 37 per cent. Sounds impressive, no? Well. not really, since the five major cities in the Rest of Canada (Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Ottawa) have seen their cumulative GPD grow 59 per cent. As well, Montréal’s unemployment rate hovers around 8.5 per cent, compared with TVCEO’s (I think I just invented an acronym!) 6.3 per cent. Says Jacques Ménard, chair of BMO Nesbitt Burns and President of the Bank of Montréal in Québec, “Montreal has been slowly decelerating for 15 years, and now it shows. Another 10 years of this and we will be in clear and present danger.”
A decade ago, however, Montréal had the fastest growing economy amongst Canada’s major cities, from 1999-2004, as Montréal was, for all intents and purposes, a post-conflict society. Montréal was healing from the long constitutional battles that erupted in the 1960s and seemed to have been finally put to bed with the divisive 1995 Referendum on Québec sovereignty. Certainly, Québec was by-and-large still represented by the separatist Bloc Québécois in Ottawa, but the Parti Québécois government of Lucien Bouchard and André Boisclair, and then the Liberals of Jean Charest, turned attention away from the ethnic nationalist debates that had divided Québec for so long. Instead, Bouchard, Gilles Duceppe and most of the leadership of the nationalist movement began thinking in terms of civic nationalism, but the largest issue was put on the back burner. And, as a result, Montréal recovered.
I remember walking back across downtown after Maurice “The Rocket” Richard’s funeral in the spring of 2000. As I passed Square Victoria, a little boy was pointing at a crane on the skyline, asking his father, “Ce quoi ça, Papa?” He was about 5 or 6, and it hit me that he probably hadn’t seen a crane in downtown Montréal. But, in the first decade of the 2000s, Montréal underwent a construction boom, and prosperity returned to the city (and it slowly began to lose its unique character, at least in the downtown core and much of the Anglophone parts of the city as global culture took hold).
But in the wake of the 2008 Global Economic Meltdown, all bets are off. Québec is now governed by a tribalist Parti Québécois, led by the incredibly uninspiring Pauline Marois (and let me be clear, despite being an Anglo, I voted for the PQ 2003, 2007, and 2008, and for the sovereigntist Québec Solidaire in 2012 and I voted for the Bloc Québécois federally in every election), who seems determined to play to her base, whipping up a frenzy amongst the “bluenecks” outside of the metropole. And now Diane de Courcy, Minister of Immigration and Cultural Communities, says that if the PQ wins a majority in the election everyone knows is coming this spring, well, then we can expect Bill 101 to be toughened. Oh boy.
I would like to point out, however, that when de Courcy says “Montreal is not a bilingual city. Quebec is not a bilingual Quebec,” she is right. The metropole is a multilingual city at this point. But, it is the metropole of Québec, which is, at least officially, unilingually French.
BUT: I would also like to point out that had anyone thought about polling the Allo- and Anglo- phones about their thoughts on leaving Québec at any time in the past decade, my guess is that the numbers wouldn’t be all that different. Most diasporic groups in Montréal have connections to similar ethnic communities in other Canadian and American cities. And Anglophones have a long tradition of driving up the 401 to Toronto and beyond, or heading to the United States (hi, there). This is not news.
In conjunction with the depressing state of the economy in Montréal and Québec, and the struggles of thereof, it’s not surprising to see so much unrest in the province. Usually when the economy tanks, people at least give some thought to moving. And the years since 2008 have seen a fair amount of mobility in North America. Since Ireland’s economy collapsed at the same time, the Irish have been leaving home in search of new opportunities. What would make this real news is if even a fraction of those who claim to have thought about leaving did pack up and leave Québec. Then we would see something akin to the Flight of the Anglos from Québec in the late 1970s. Until then, this really should be filed under “Interesting, but not news.”
An Alternative America
January 30, 2014 § 4 Comments
A couple of days ago, an interesting article appeared in the Des Moines Register. I knew of it because my social media friend, and a geographer at Mansfield University in Pennsylvania, Andy Shears, had a map published with the article. Andy’s map is an alternative United States, based on historically proposed states, none of which came into existence. He created the map 2 1/2 years ago for his own blog. The Register also mis-identifies Andy’s map as one of what the country would look like if all the separatist movements in history had actually worked. But, either way, it’s actually a really interesting map, put together in what I image was after agonising research, Andy came up with an alternative United States based on a country of 124 separate states, all based on proposals that never came to be. In the case of Massachusetts, there would actually be two states: Massachusetts and Boston. Of course, anyone who lives outside the Hub, especially in Western Mass, would say there already ARE two Massachusetts. Cascadia, in this version, is a state that straddles the mountains of eastern Washington and Oregon. And then there’s a wonderful little state called Forgottonia carved into what is today the border between Illinois and Missouri, just north of the hypothetical state of St. Louis.
The America That Never Was, map courtesy of AndrewShears.com
But I digress. The column in the Register was written by Steffan Schmidt, a political scientist at Iowa State. In it, Schmidt ruminates on an apparent proposal in California to split the state into six smaller states, based on a proposal from Silicon Valley. Schmidt notes that this would give the general California region 12 senators compared to the 2 it has now, which means that it would have much greater power in Washington. Schmidt, though, seems to assume that the 6 Californias would all elect Democratic senators, which is incredibly unlikely.
Schmidt’s larger point is about the apparent immutability of the United States, that Americans consider the national boundaries to be sacrosanct. He ties that back to the Civil War, just another legacy of that war in American life. But then he goes on to note that countries fracture into newer ones continually, pointing to various examples from Slovakia to Scotland to South Sudan. Interestingly, he does not mention Québec and Canada. But that’s an entirely different kettle of fish (though, interestingly, both Canadians and Quebecers consider their national borders to be sacrosanct). But it is a point well worth considering, at least to a degree.
The difference between, say, Scotland and the United States is simple. Scotland was annexed by England to create Britain in 1707. The United States is comprised of states that all chose to be part of the Union. By that I mean the European settlers of the territory that is now the United States of America all petitioned to Congress to be admitted to the Union. And even if the Confederate States were defeated and then had to be re-admitted to the Union, they also did so willingly (or at least as willingly as they could). In contrast, Scotland was annexed. Slovakia was annexed. We all know how Yugoslavia was formed and what happened when that came apart.
So there is a huge difference between the American model and those Schmidt offers in comparison. Similarly, Canada was formed in a manner very similar to the United States. But Schmidt is correct to note that it is remarkable how resilient the American state has been since 1776. I was recently thinking about this when I saw news that the population shift in the United States, based on recent census data, will make the South and the West stronger politically, at least in the House. This led me to think about my current research, of course (The far right of American politics and history), and I began to wonder if the relative decline of New England and the Northwest in favour of greater power in the South and Southwest would lead to separatist movements throughout the nation. Not that I think they’d ever be successful, any more than I think Québec will ever separate. But it’s fun to have such idle thoughts.
And then I got one of the great classics of punk rock in my head, “Alternative Ulster,” by Belfast punks Stiff Little Fingers. The song dates from 1978, the height of the Troubles, and the Stiffies, two Catholics and two Protestants, simply wanted a different future for themselves.
Got Land? Thank an Indian and Canadian racism
January 17, 2014 § 12 Comments
Tenelle Star is a 13-year old girl who is a member of the Star Blanket First Nation in Saskatchewan. She goes to school in Balcarres, SK. Last week when she wore a hilarious pink hoodie that asked “Got Land?” on the front, and said “Thank an Indian” on the back, she created a controversy. The CBC reported on the matter on 14 January, and from there things have gone sort of viral. Jeff Menard, the Winnipeg man behind the shirts, says he’s getting flooded with orders. But the fallout around Star’s hoodie is getting ridiculous.
A few days ago, I tweeted my disbelief, in a rather inelegant fashion after reading the comments on the original CBC story:
https://twitter.com/Matthew_Barlow/status/423498348289474560
The response to this and a few other similar, though more eloquent, tweets was generally positive, but I got some pushback. Most of it was garden-variety racism, but this one was particularly interesting:
Further discussion revealed nothing, and I spent the rest of the day trying to figure out the logic, which appeared to be connected to the term “Indian.” Of course, the term comes from Christopher Columbus who, upon landing Hispaniola in 1492 thought he was in India. The name stuck. Today it is an incredibly loaded term politically, but, despite all that many aboriginals in Canada continue to prefer the term to the various attempts at replacing it. And if we really want to get semantic, I could point out that the term “India” for the country India actually comes from the Persians who termed the land around the Indus River India in the 5th century BCE.
The second part of that tweet was much more obvious. Blue Squadron’s grandfather worked for a living, the implication being that aboriginals in Canada do not. That’s beneath contempt.
This morning on the CBC’s website the fallout from Star’s hoodie continued. Her Facebook page has been inundated with comments, most of which are positive, but more than a few are disgustingly racist. The sad fact of the matter is that Canada is a racist nation when it comes to the First Nations, as I noted in this tweet
https://twitter.com/Matthew_Barlow/status/423596289733824512
One only need read the comments on the CBC article, or even the comments on Star’s Facebook page to see that. I also have the added benefit of having worked for eight years in the field of aboriginal law and litigation in Canada. I was a research analyst for an Ottawa-based company, we did research surrounding the myriad claims and counterclaims between the First Nations of Canada and the federal and provincial governments. The duplicity of government agents astounded me then, it still does today. And that’s not even touching the racism. I could cite many examples of horrible racist comments I came across the in the archives, but one has always stuck out for its complete lack of self-reflection. It came from an RCMP officer named Gallagher (an Irish name) who, when supervising a work camp where a few aboriginal men were sentenced for trivial criminal acts, complained that they didn’t want to do the backbreaking work. Said Gallagher, “They are sun-burnt Irishmen.” Oy vey.
But today, a new low was reached with the CBC reporting on the response of a Vancouver woman, Michele Tittler, to Star’s sweatshirt. Tittler is the head of this group called End Race-Based Laws, Inc., which was apparently formed in response to last year’s #IdleNoMore movement. This is from the CBC article:
Michele Tittler was posting on social media sites connected to the story. Tittler, from Vancouver, is a co-founder of a non-profit political organization called End Race-Based Laws, or ERBL Inc.
“I was immensely offended,” Tittler told CBC News Thursday, regarding the message of the shirt. “And I was going to do everything within my power to have that shirt banned from that school.”
Tittler said she had written to the Balcarres school and also sent notes to Facebook, complaining about the content on Starr’s page.
She is also planning to lodge a formal complaint with the Canadian Human Rights Commission , although it’s not clear on what grounds. Tittler is, however, convinced that the message of the shirt is racist.
“This is racism,” she said. “Canadians are really getting sick of the double-standard. No white kid could walk into a school with a shirt that says that in reverse.”
First off, no white kid SHOULD walk into school wearing the reverse of Star’s hoodie. Secondly, it is NOT reverse racism, it’s not racism. Tittler is is just flat-out, plain wrong. She is the latest iteration of an old phenomenon in Canadian history. Many aboriginals in Canada would be just as happy getting rid of the Indian Act, but the fact of the matter is that cannot happen. The playing field in Canada is not even. First Nations start at such a massive disadvantage to the average Canadian it’s almost unbelievable. The on-going legacy of Canadian colonialism and the systematic attempt at ethnocide in the 19th and early 20th centuries remain. During that period Canada made every attempt it could to eradicate aboriginals from Canada, not by killing them, but by taking their culture, making their kids speak English or French, through residential schools, through enfranchising aboriginals for leaving reserves and so on. None of that worked, for obvious reasons.
It is disgraceful that Canada remains such a fundamentally racist society when it comes to First Nations. It is a shame. It embarrasses me. In the year 2000, I was working in Ottawa, on a claim that centred around a group of Inuit in what is now Nunavut. This is where that gem from Officer Gallagher comes from. It was just one of many, and the more I read in the archives, the more appalled I was. And the more embarrassed that my country could have acted in this way. It was also Canada Day. In Ottawa. It was not a happy time for me.
And fourteen years on, it hasn’t got any better. The National Post, that noted bastion of retrenchment, published a collection of letters it received on residential schools, all of which appear to have been written by white people. I was astounded. Just astounded at these comments.
This is not going to get better at any time soon. It’s acceptable for far too many Canadians to be racist in this respect. And that is to the great shame of Canada.
The English Language and Montreal
January 8, 2014 § 8 Comments
An interesting oped appeared in the Montreal Gazette today. It was written by a guy, Nicholas Robinson, who teaches Japanese in Montreal, an expat American who has been there for the past 30 years. He is critical of the Anglo community of Quebec when they kvetch about not getting service in English, whether at the hospital or on the STM. He says that learning French is just as essential to living in Montreal as learning Japanese is to living in Kyoto.
I tend to agree, the fact of the matter is that Quebec is a French province and Montreal is a French city. Last time I looked at census data, just a shade under 600,000 Quebecers identified as Anglos, as defined by speaking English as their mother tongue. That’s 7.7% of the population of Quebec. The largest group of Anglos live in and around Montreal, where 16.8% of the population is Anglo. Statistically, that’s a sizeable minority. And yet, most Anglos, at least in Montreal are at least functionally bilingual.
Robinson goes on to argue that “the French speakers of Quebec have been incredibly tolerant of the anglophone “community,” and a vast swath of them have gone to the immense trouble of learning English — when they don’t have to at all.” I also tend to agree here, though I will note something based on my experience of teaching CÉGEP for 6 years. I would say that somewhere between 40-45% of our students at my Anglophone CÉGEP were francophone, some of whom did not have great English-language skills upon entering the school. But their reason for wanting to go to CÉGEP in English (they often went onto French-language universities) was simple: English is the dominant language in the world today, and is the lingua franca of global business (I would also add that about 70% of my students wanted to get degrees in business or related fields). So there are practical reasons for Quebec’s francophones to learn and speak English.
But, as you might expect, the comments in response to Robinson’s missive are, well, predictable. And vitriolic. They include exhortations that he remove himself from Quebec and “go home.” But the first comment I saw was perhaps the most instructive of all. The commentator lambasts Robinson and notes that Canada is a bilingual nation. And Quebec is a province of that bilingual nation. That much is true.
But. Quebec is not bilingual. In fact, there is only one officially bilingual province in Canada: New Brunswick, though Ontario and Manitoba will also provide services in French to their population. Moreover, despite the fact that, say, British Columbia is a province in a bilingual nation, good luck getting anyone to speak French to you in Vancouver. Canadian bilingualism functions in reality a lot more along the Belgian model: insofar as it exists, it’s regional. Canada has something called a “bilingual belt” that stretches from New Brunswick along the St. Lawrence River valley to Eastern Ontario. Within this belt, you will find a sizeable amount of the populace that can speak both English and French, and you’ll also find some bilinguality in Manitoba. Aside from that, though, forget it.
So, in reality, the Anglophone population of Quebec and Montreal, as Robinson notes, has it relatively good. An Anglophone in Montreal can get an education in English, and healthcare in English, and there is a robust Anglo media in the city. And, I might add, while I can speak French, when I had to deal with the government of Quebec, I tended to at least try to get service in English, in large part because I, like many Anglos, don’t trust my French all that much. This was especially the case when dealing with Revenu Québec or the Ministère de la Santé et les services sociaux. Much to my surprise, this was never a problem. I always got responses in English. A francophone in Toronto gets none of that.
Having said that, Montreal has a robust Anglophone community because it has jealously protected itself and its “rights”, especially since the rise of the Parti québécois’ first government in 1976 and Bill 101 in 1977. But that doesn’t mean that Robinson doesn’t have a point.
Phil Robertson, the 1st Amendment and Free Speech
December 20, 2013 § 1 Comment
As I wrap up the Griffintown book, and reach the end of what has been a decade-plus-long odyssey, I have begun work on a new research project that examines the far right of American politics and its relationship to history. As such, I have spent a lot of time working with the US Constitution, its history, its interpretation, and its meaning. Beginning with this post, I will be using this space to begin to hash out ideas for this project.
———
So Phil Robertson is a homophobic bigot. The Duck Dynasty patriarch was interviewed by GQ and when asked his definition of sinful behaviour responded “Start with homosexual behaviour and just morph out from there.” Robertson is a deeply religious man. So his beliefs, as deeply offensive as they are, aren’t all that surprising.
What has struck me is the firestorm on Twitter about Robertson, and the conservative backlash against his suspension from the show (not that it’ll matter, this season’s episodes are already filmed, the season starts in the spring and the long-term future of the show is up in the air). From what I’ve seen on Twitter, Robertson’s bigotry is being framed as a 1st Amendment issue. The argument I’ve seen on Twitter from rank and file “constitutional conservatives” is that A&E (the network that Duck Dynasty is on) and all the “libtards” (I suppose I’m one of them) are violating Robertson’s 1st Amendment rights. Even Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal has suggested Robertson’s constitutional rights are at stake.
They’re not. At all. The 1st Amendment reads as follows:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
In other words, the 1st Amendment is limited to government. “Congress shall make no law…”, and the courts, up to and including the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) have consistently limited the alleged rights and freedoms the Bill of Rights gives to government, limiting the reach of government. In other words, private corporations and private citizens are not bound by the 1st Amendment or any other of the Amendments that are part of the Bill of Rights. So that takes care of that argument.
As for Bobby Jindal, when he says, “This is a free country, and everyone is entitled to express their views,” he is bang on correct. But it has nothing to do with the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. Robertson can expose his own bigotry any day of the week and six times on Sunday. But Jindal’s argument is disingenuous at best. His implication is that anyone who is opposed to Robertson’s ideas is stifling his right to speak his mind. In other words, those who are appalled at Robertson’s comments to GQ are NOT entitled to their right to speak their minds. Interesting, that.
The Truth and How to Deal With it When Studying History
November 19, 2013 § 6 Comments
In two of the books I’ve read recently I found myself incredibly frustrated by the authors’ insistence on “The Truth” and the “True Story.” It is worth noting that neither book was written by a professional historian, despite the fact that both dealt with historical subjects. So I began to think about how we historians are trained to think about “truth” in graduate school, how we deal with various truths in the documents, and by obvious attempts at obfuscation by historical actors. And how we deal with gaps in the sources.
Each author deal with these problems differently. In Jack Weatherford’s Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, I was troubled by Weatherford’s inability to deal with at least one of his sources critically. Weatherford makes great use of a source called “The Secret History”, which covers the early history of the Mongols in Temujin’s (Chinggis Khan) rise. I found myself continuously wondering if The Secret History was actually verifiably true, or if it was something to be taken with a grain of salt, which is what my sense was in reading Weatherford’s book.
But the bigger problem came in C.J. Chivers’ The Gun. Chivers was understandably frustrated throughout his research and writing process by the varying story of the development and proliferation of the AK-47 in the Soviet Union. Mikhail Kalashnikov himself has published multiple autobiographies, both during the Soviet era and after, and has given countless interviews to the media, both before and after the fall of the USSR. And in almost everyone of them, he gave different versions of his own biography, of his development of the AK-47 and so on. I would’ve been frustrated in Chivers’ shoes.
For example, Kalasknikov’s brother, Nikolai, was sent to a Stalin-era prison camp when they were young. Chivers is frustrated in figuring out what Nikolai’s sentence was. At the end of the day, I found myself wondering “who cares”? I am less interested in what sentence Nikolai Kalashnikov received than the fact that he was sentenced to a labour camp in the first place. And I felt that Chivers spent too much time and space in the book expressing his frustration and inability to get to the fact of the matter there to the detriment of a discussion of the Kalashnikov family’s status as kulaks during Collectivisation during the Stalin era.
Chivers also spends the most time and effort complaining about Kalashnikov’s biography. He also is downright naïve in expressing his frustration with Soviet-era sources and the multiple truths of the era, as if nothing like that ever happened in the US or any other Western nation. At any rate, Chivers goes on a long rant about Kalashnikov co-operating with Soviet authorities in the re-crafting of his biography (Chivers prefers the term “white-washing”, which, while being accurate is ahistorical). Kalashnikov’s family were kulaks, enemies of the state. They were exiled to Siberia. No kidding Kalashnikov needed a new biography when he became the inventor of the AK-47, which Chivers makes a strong and compelling argument as the greatest invention of the USSR. His background as the son of kulaks had to be deleted from the story and a new version be created for public consumption. To criticise Kalashnikov for participating in this process is almost laughable. Obviously he had to participate. He didn’t have a choice in a totalitarian dictatorship. At least not if he wanted to keep living.
At any rate, it just so happens that, as a public historian, this is the kind of thing I study. Public historians spend a lot of time looking at how stories get created, whether they are wider cultural stories or individual ones. If Chivers thinks that what Kalashnikov participated in only happened in totalitarian communist states, he’s deeply, deeply mistaken. Manufactured histories are part and parcel of almost daily life in Canada and the USA.
But the question of truth is what I’m interested in here. Fact. Statistics don’t speak for themselves. Numbers don’t speak for themselves. A picture is not worth a thousand words. Facts are simple things. Fact: Canadian Confederation happened on 1 July 1867. But why? And what did it mean? The why can be answered in many ways, both narrowly and widely. It can be answered looking at what was happening in the United States, it can be answered looking at British colonial politics. Or by what was happening in Canada. Or a combination thereof. The standard interpretation of what it means is that it was the birth of Canada. But Canada in 1867 was four provinces, comprised of three colonies. That’s about it. It didn’t mean that Canada now had control of its own internal affairs. That happened in 1848. It didn’t mean that Canada gained control of foreign affairs. That happened in 1931. There was no such thing as Canadian citizenship until 1948. Nor was the Supreme Court of Canada the highest court of appeal until then. Canada did not control its own constitution until 1982. So, in short, facts only cover a very simple corner of the story. Interpretation is necessary.
To use an example from The Gun: The Ak-47 was developed in 1947. Or was it? Chivers does a wonderful job teasing out the details of the weapon’s creation in the late 1940s, to say nothing of the massive re-tooling of the gun that continued into the 1950s. Even nailing down 1947 as the date of the gun’s creation isn’t as straight-forward as one would think, at least according to Chivers.
So, the truth. Or the true story. In my experience, rarely is something billed as the “true story” actually that. Truth is a messy concept. And this is what we historians are trained in. We recognise that the honest truth isn’t necessarily a possibility (or even desirable) in telling a story. Other things are more important, such as in the case of Nikolai Kalashnikov’s trip to the gulag. Again, the actual sentence doesn’t interest me as much as why he was sent to the gulag. In other words, there are varying shades of grey in sorting out the historical story. And sometimes the actual straight truth isn’t that important to the story. In the end, Chivers’ story is made all the more interesting for all the work he does in developing and elucidating the various stories of the development of the AK-47 and the various biographies and stories to be told about its inventor (or maybe he wasn’t the inventor, another version of the story could just as easily been that the gun was the result of a collective team), Mikhail Kalashnikov.
Lest We Forget: Red and White Poppies
November 6, 2013 § 2 Comments
Twitter’s a wonderful thing. Sometimes. Today it is. I just learned about a movement in Canada to distribute white poppies for Remembrance Day. This apparently comes from the Rideau Institute, which is a left-of-centre think tank in Ottawa.
Flanders Field, World War I
White poppies have a long history in the United Kingdom, they date back to the immediate post-First World War era, when pacifists decided they wanted to commemorate the dead of the war and to put forward the hope that the War to End All Wars was in fact a war to end all wars (we know how that turned out). These pacifists wanted to remember all war dead, not just the British dead, which is what their problem with the red poppy was. The red poppy also took on sectarian tones in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, where it was a largely Unionist symbol.
But Canada does not have this history, it does not have the politicisation of something like the Troubles. The poppy is a pretty apolitical statement. I wore a red poppy in Canada, and now, living in the US, I feel slightly awkward in late October and November without my poppy. I have great fondness of memories of getting poppies, I liked to go to Second World War veterans, who pinned the poppy onto my lapel. There was something profound about that little ceremony, I felt like it connected me, however ephemerally, to my grandparents’ generation (both my grandmother and grandfather served in the Second World War). And it tied me to our history as a nation.
I generally oppose war, though I do believe there is such a thing as a just war. And the two world wars of the last century are, to my mind, just wars. But I don’t think my preference for peace is compromised by wearing a poppy.
The Rideau Institute says that its white poppies are for those who don’t want to celebrate war. That is not what the red poppy symbolises. The red poppy commemorates the dead of the wars, those who served. The white poppy confuses the means with the end. It politicises Remembrance Day in Canada, the very thing that should not happen. That the Rideau Institute thinks this is a good idea saddens me somewhat.
Urban Redevelopment: Getting it Wrong, Springfield, MA
October 27, 2013 § 3 Comments
City Hall Plaza, Boston
As regular readers of this blog know, I am interested in urban redevelopment, especially when it comes to questions of doing it right and doing it wrong (and chances at redemption). For the most part, the wave of urban redevelopment that hit North American cities in the 70s and 80s was the wrong way, in that it left us with neo-brutalist architecture in the midst of our cities that is cold, uninviting and intimidating. A case in point of this would be City Hall Plaza in Boston. It’s a desolate, soulless urban square that people use for one of three purposes: 1) official events, because they have no choice; 2) to sit on the fringes of to eat lunch; 3) to get to the Government Center T station. Many cities have this problem today, these horrid, horrid neo-brutalist buildings. In some places, like Boston, it doesn’t so much matter, because the downtown core of the city is bustling, Government Center lies between Faneuil Hall/Quincy Market and the stately Boston Common. Government Center is the site of, well, government in Boston and so this site is full of civil servants, but also tourists and Bostonians crossing between the tourist centres, the North End, and the downtown core of the city. In other places, like nearby Worcester, this 70s/80s wave of urban redevelopment led to a massive #fail.
But, the legacy of deindustrialisation is also very real, especially in small formerly urban centres, like Worcester, but also Springfield, Mass. Springfield is about 100 miles west of Boston and it feels about as faraway from Boston as one can get. Springfield is a depressed, sad little city. It has a high crime rate, nearly double that for the rest of the Commonwealth, including Boston. It’s murder rate, .13 per thousand, is almost triple the national average (perhaps unironically, Smith & Wesson’s corporate headquarters are in Springfield). The same is true for robbery and assault. Its property crime rates are also well above the national average.
It wasn’t always like this for Springfield. Until the 1960s, it was a bucolic industrial city, surrounded by natural beauty. It had a low crime and unemployment. It was the very first Springfield in the USA, and was the birthplace of basketball. Indian Motorcycles were from Springfield. So was Charles Goodyear. Merriam-Webster’s first dictionary was published there in 1805.
I-91, downtown Springfield and the Basketball Hall of Fame
Springfield experienced decline due to a combination of deindustrialisation, the closing of the Springfield Armory in 1969 (the target of Daniel Shays and his rebels in 1786), and poor urban development decisions (most notably the running of I-91 through the downtown core and cutting off downtown from the waterfront of the Connecticut River. Various attempts to redevelop the city have failed miserably (like the basketball Hall of Fame). And recently, the city decided that it was going to open a massive urban casino to flag the failing fortunes of Springfield. Why they thought this would work is beyond me. Certainly, people will now come to Springfield to shop and gamble. But, the casino will also siphon off jobs and hurt what business still exists in the downtown core. And now, even that appears to be at risk.
Rural Palimpsests: Amity, Missouri
October 24, 2013 § 9 Comments
Amity is a blink-and-you-miss it tiny town on Route J in northwestern Missouri. The last census put its population at 54, though it has since shrunk to 47 (though, in the stupidity of American metropolitan areas, it is apart of the St. Joseph MO-KS Metropolitan Statistical Area, despite the fact that there is 30 miles of relatively empty farmland between St. Joseph and Amity). It looks, for all intents and purposes, like a dying town. Amity was founded in 1872, but when the Chicago and Rock Island Railway was completed in 1885, the townsite moved about a mile north to straddle the tracks. In its new location, Amity thrived, as general stores, hotels, banks, schools, and churches popped up as the town became an important stop on the railway. A stockyard for the Rock developed and the town became a waystation and loading zone for agricultural products from DeKalb County onto the railway. Similarly, consumer items were unloaded in Amity for the stores there and for DeKalb County in general. The town’s population rose to a high of 225 in the 1920s.
But Amity was a victim of circumstances, as it lived with the Rock, it also died with it. The Chicago Rock Island and Pacific (as it was eventually called) was a notoriously poorly-run and inefficient railway. By the 1970s, the gig was up. It had been run into the ground, and it pulled out of Amity in 1975. But the Rock (and Amity) were the victims of more than just poor management. Deindustrialisation was also central to the story here. As factories shut down in the major cities of the MidWest, from Chicago to Kansas City and beyond, the railways became increasingly less important to the heartland of the United States. And Amitysuffered. Even before the railway pulled out, the stores were suffering, the schools and churches were closing.
The former site of the Chicago Rock Island Pacific Railway through Amity
Today, Amity is barely hanging on. During our cross-country trip in August, we stayed with friends in Amity, Sam and Monica. To my city eyes, Amity was a piece of rural paradise. But Sam and I got talking about the history of the town. Sam is a native of Amity and Monica is from nearby Maysville. The longer we talked, the more fascinated with Amity’s past and present I became. I have written before on the changing rural landscape in North America (Hawley, Massachusetts, Phoenix, British Columbia, and Sainte-Sylvestre, Québec), but in talking with Sam I began to think about the costs of deindustrialisation in North America.
Abandoned home, Amity
Reams of work has been done on deindustrialisation in major cities (Buffalo, Cleveland, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Toronto, Hamilton), and my own work has looked at the cost of deindustrialisation on Griffintown, Montréal. But there was a real trickle-down effect at work here. The landscape of the MidWest (to say nothing of the rest of the continent) is cluttered with Amitys, places that were once important waystations on the railways, or homes to factories themselves (Monica’s mother worked at a Quaker Oats plant packaging instant oatmeal for two decades before it closed down). But their stories are in danger of being lost through little more than negligence.
As a culture, we don’t pay attention to these forgotten places, hell, we don’t even pay attention to the MidWest, at least outside of Chicago. For the life of me, I cannot call to mind a single TV show or movie set in a Midwestern city that’s not Chicago in the past quarter century. No wonder the people of the MidWest feel left out.
2nd Street, Amity, looking north towards where the railway used to be
But there is history here (I realise that sounds like a dead obvious statement) and the stories from places like Amity are important, as they speak to the human and cultural cost of deindustrialisation in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s just as much as those stories that arise out of Buffalo and Hamilton and Milwaukee. They place a human cost on the depopulation of rural areas of North America, and they place a cost on the loss of culture. The four of us (my wife, Margo, and I, Sam and Monica) are barely into our 40s, but we have lived through a series of cultural revolutions, from politics to technology. We are a transitional generation between the old ways of doing things and the (post)modern, post-industrial culture that we live in today. We remember rotary telephones and a world before the internet. Hard to imagine. But we’re also glued to our iPhones and lost without the internet when it goes down. Sam’s work as an artist seeks to preserve what he calls “obscure” technologies, printmaking and pottery. And I am an historian, my entire professional life is centred on the past. As a public historian, my work is centred on how we remember that past.
I am currently working on a research project that looks at the relationship between the far right of American politics and its relationship to history. But once that wraps up, hopefully in the next 6-8 months, I am going to begin work on my next project, which will be based on Amity and DeKalb County, looking at the cost of deindustrialisation on these rural spaces in the MidWest.
The Failure of Urban Redevelopment and the Chance at Redemption: Worcester
October 22, 2013 § 4 Comments
Worcester, Massachusetts, is like pretty much every city in New England not named Boston or Providence, and kinda like those Easter Bunnies I used to get when I was a kid: hollow centre. The downtowns of Hartford, New Haven, Springfield, Worcester, etc. were done in by deindustrialisation and horrid, horrid urban redevelopment schemes. The urban redevelopments schemes of the 70s, in hindsight, look as though they were especially created to destroy urban centres, not save them. Boston’s Government Center, for example, is one of the most hideous examples of neo-brutalist architecture I’ve ever seen.
Water/Fire, Providence, RI
Government Center, Boston
Worcester’s other problem is that it’s near Boston, less than an hour away. In fact, before I moved to Massachusetts, I thought Worcester was just a suburb of Boston. Boston is by far the biggest city in New England, over 5 times as big as the number 2 city, which just so happens to be Worcester (in fact, Worcester is the western boundary of the ridiculous Boston-Worcester-Manchester Combined Statistical Area). Worcester gets by, it is the home to several universities, including the University of Massachusetts Medical School, plus hospitals. But the downtown is a disaster.
City Hall Plaza, Boston
Worcester attempted and failed miserably to redesign its downtown in the 70s. It made sense at the time, as Paul McMorrow points out in today’s Boston Globe, the city erected a shopping mall downtown to counter the growth of suburban shopping malls. This was a common tactic. In some places, usually Canadian cities, this worked. Vancouver, Toronto, Montréal, Calgary, Ottawa all have shopping malls downtown. And in those cities, the malls are successful. Those are also very large cities, Ottawa is the smallest and its urban centre is still over 1 million people. It is worth noting, however, that I cannot think, off the top of my head, of a large American city with a successful shopping mall at its core. Boston has a small shopping concourse in the Prudential Center, but that’s it.
Nevertheless, the Worcester Center Galleria was a valiant effort. But it failed. Twice.
Worcester Center Galleria
The mall, when it was constructed, obliterated the street grid and landscape of downtown Worcester. But now, it’s been town down and the old street grid is being restored. The new CitySquare development is designed to do what most new urban redevelopments do: provide shopping, office space, and urban condos. All to convince a new, wealthy, demographic to move downtown, and stay downtown. McMorrow is hopeful for Worcester, as am I. And as Providence shows, urban redevelopment can be done and can be successful. But Worcester has the same problems as the rest of Massachusetts outside of Boston: the economy.
Matthew Barlow 